


Miles to Go

by orphan_account



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-02 13:31:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4061836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arya goes on a soul-searching journey to come to terms with her past history of violence.  </p><p>Sort of a loose sequel to "Loud Pipes Save Lives".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wolfie

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Loud Pipes Save Lives](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2127309) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



 

From a distance, the gas station looked abandoned, but Arya powered forward, since there was nothing behind her, either. As she drew closer, she saw that a couple of the lights above the elderly pumps were lit; hanging on by a thread, but lit. The large sign by the roadside was out, but the light inside the shop was on. A sandwich board stood outside the shop bearing the words “CASH ONLY” painted in a messy red scrawl. It would do.

The bike was grumbling beneath her, in no danger of stalling, but feeling restless and displeased at her for having allowed the fuel to get so low. “Sorry, baby,” she muttered to it, “we’re going to take care of you in just a minute.”

When she pushed the shop door open and the bells on it jangled, the proprietor seemed startled that anyone was coming in here. She was sitting behind the counter, counting cartons of cigarettes, and looking for all the world like an older, more worn-down version of her Arya’s own mother. Where Catelyn Stark was elegant, stately even, this woman was dowdy and exhausted, looking as dusty and bleached by the sun as everything else in this stretch of Arizona desert.

“You lost, sugar?” she asked, after selling Arya some gas and some beef jerky.

“Nah,” Arya assured her, “I’m good. Heading to Sedona.”

The woman nodded. “You an artist?”

Arya shook her head.

The woman looked her up and down. “Well you sure don’t look like a spa kind of gal, sweetheart.”

Arya smiled faintly. “I’m not. There’s a retreat I kind of wanted to check out.”

A screen door slapped in the back of the shop, and a scruffy old German shepherd loped in from the back. He took one look at Arya and pranced over to her, nuzzling at her hand. She knelt down to get on eye level with him. “Hey there, big guy. What’s your name?”

“That’s Wolfie,” the woman answered for him.

Arya smiled as Wolfie inspected her, sniffed her leather jacket, and then gave her face a couple of gentle licks. “Wolfie,” she repeated, scratching behind his ears. “You look just like a doggie I used to have, you know that?” Wolfie seemed pleased to hear this and nuzzled at her chin. “Her name was Nymeria, and she’d probably be just your age now if that jerk hadn’t hit him with his car.” She still felt anger in the pit of her chest when she though of that spoiled blond teenage boy and his total lack of concern for Nym after hitting her with his red and gold Mustang. It was a long time ago, but looking in Wolfie’s eyes, Arya found that she still wanted to punch that Joffrey kid till she’d broken every one of his bones.

She suddenly missed Nymeria.

She missed her mother.

She missed Dany, who had not quite understood why Arya needed to take this trip. She said goodbye to Wolfie, and headed back out to the bike. She had miles to go before she would sleep.


	2. A Girl Can Learn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya finds her destination.

Sometimes Arya dreamed of the opening bell, the lights, the exchange of grunts, the flash of her silks and the referees’ shouts. How many times had she gotten up in the ring, under the lights? She couldn’t remember. She won most times, and the row of trophies on the mantle in her mother’s brownstone was testament to how many girls in her own weight class she’d laid out in kickboxing tournaments around the country.

But sometimes Arya dreamed of those other fights; the ones she’d shared with Dany, the ones that were casualties of what they’d believed at the time was a righteous crusade. The trail of broken, bloodied men dogged her nights from Brooklyn, where she and Dany shared their cramped apartment, out to the Western desert. Arya would wake from those dreams in the cold desert nights and light up a joint, staring up into the vast expanse of black sky studded with a hundred times the stars that she could see in the city.

Dany had seemed to find her own peace with the violence they’d done in the name of protecting the weak. But then, Dany was always grounded in ways that Arya never had been. She had her community, her best friend Missandei, her faith. Arya had always been something of a lone wolf until she’d fallen in love with Dany: she was different from the rest of her family, never fit in with her the other girls she was surrounded by as she was kicked from one tony prep school to the next, never felt clear enough in her identity to be comfortable in the gay community.

Arya sat awake in the brush of the campgrounds in the bluffs, staring at the sunrise blooming over the horizon. Smoke from the end of a nearly-spent joint curled around her head, and she missed the sounds of Dany in these small hours when the sky was still pale; how she would roll from the bed naked and sing her prayers on the small rug beside the bed. Though she found some second hand reassurance in her lover’s routines, Arya still felt unmoored. She still felt she needed answers, and there none to be found in the cramped apartment she shared with Dany on a noisy block in Flatbush.

She snapped a photo of the sunrise with her phone and sent it to Dany: _a divine sunrise,_ the accompanying text read.

Sedona was almost a randomly chosen destination. Arya only knew that she needed to get far away, as far as she could reasonably get on her bike. Sedona, up in the mountains of Arizona, was supposed to be full of artists, craftsmen and pricey spas. She’d found it by accident, searching for ashrams out west. _Why ashrams?_ Dany had asked. _You don’t know the first thing about yoga._

Arya had no real answer. She stubbed out the joint, ran her fingers through her hair, and trudged out to her bike. With a final thought for home and Dany, and a brief moment for sweet-natured Wolfie, she mounted the bike and rode forward into the horizon and the red rocks waiting for her.

 

The House of Black and White was not, strictly speaking, an ashram so much as it was a “shamanic retreat”, a phenomenon that seemed to consist of whatever the “shaman” in charge decided it was. But it was small, it was far from New York, and the photograph of the shaman who ran it, Jaqen H’gar, resonated with her. He looked like a man who had found peace, but also had traveled there from a very dark place, by a path of thorns. Also, with his long, stringy hair and what appeared to be a Tom Waits “Swordfish Trombone” t-shirt, he looked like he could have been an ex-biker.

The retreat sat tucked in the shadow of the red, striated spires of Cathedral Rock, overlooking a large reflecting pool. It was a pair of unassuming, low-slung, terracotta colored buildings and, beyond them, open space dotted with tents and cactuses. Something about it felt a little like home for her; while her father’s side of the family could trace its heritage back to Scottish lords, her mother’s side, the Tullys, was bit murkier. Yes, they’d been one of the prominent families of industry and philanthropy in Chicago since the 1800s, but the Tullys weren’t only of Irish descent; family rumors had always swirled that her great-great-great-grandfather Elston Tully had married a Cheyenne woman while he was out west, mining, because his wife was only ever identified by a first name, “Mary”, in the Tully genealogy drawings. It was common back then when white men married tribal women that the women would get christened with a Christian name; Mary Tully had no maiden name and no other identifiers. It was fodder for all sorts of family speculation and a few years’ worth of cringe-inducing Halloween costumes in Arya’s youth.

She parked her bike and walked up to the largest of the two buildings. The front doors were painted: one black, one white. _Well_ , she thought, _that's a little on the nose._ She rang the bell, and waited. Then rang it again.

Nothing. She looked around, stared up into the enormous sky, the cut of the red bluffs against it. She heard the highway traffic in the distance, the sharp, distant cry of what she supposed was a coyote. She smelled something like campfire smells wafting in from the fields and indeed, though she couldn’t see a soul, a few of the tents seemed to have smoke coming from behind them.

She trudged around the back, and found him there. He looked exactly like his photograph on the website. He was sitting in a lounge chair on the stone patio, in the shade of a particularly tall cascalote tree, its yellow flowers still clinging onto the branches. His strange, pale eyes stared out into past the tents, into the bluffs, and seemed to stare through them entirely. A small firepit burned in front of him.

She stood for a moment, waiting for him to notice her presence. When he said nothing, she cleared her throat. “Jaqen H’gar?”

He didn’t move, and didn’t take his gaze away from the horizon. She waited what seemed like an eternity. “Why does a girl come here?” he asked finally. His accent was curious, she couldn’t quite place it. Eastern European, maybe? There was little biography to speak of on his website. It started to occur to her that she’d ridden across the country to go hang out with some weird Serbian guy with no real credentials. Then again, she wondered, what credentials was a shaman supposed to have anyway?

“Well, this is a retreat, right?” she responded, not quite sure whether to be irritable or ingratiating.

“Yes,” he said after a long moment. “Is a girl retreating?”

She considered the question. “I don’t know. I’m trying to get my head straight.”

He nodded, still not looking at her. “A girl has doubts?”

She wrinkled her brow at his curious accent, his odd phrasing. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Then a girl needs a guru. A guru means, a remover of doubts. That is not what I do here. A girl needs to go find herself an ashram.”

Arya huffed. “I don’t want an ashram. I don’t do yoga.”

“A girl can learn.”

“I don’t want to get rid of my doubts,” she snapped. “I just want to figure out how to live with them.”

Jaqen H’gar looked at her, finally. He seemed to look both into her and through her at the same time. “Then go and break two long twigs from that tree.”

She looked at him curiously. “Why?”

He reached beside him, producing a paper grocery bag. He reached in and pulled out a bag of marshmallows, smiling an odd little smile. “Because a girl should not roast a marshmallow with her bare hands. Not today.”


	3. Lone Coyote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya finds the retreat confusing; she makes a friend; she receives a strange gift.

Jaqen H’gar was an utterly peculiar person.  Arya hoped that this merely came with the territory of being truly enlightened… or whatever it was you were supposed to be in order to become a shaman.  After they toasted their marshmallows, Jaqen looked at the sunset painting its gold and ruby colors against the vast desert sky and decided, “Tonight, you will join us at the fire.”

She shrugged.  He showed her to an unoccupied tent.  “The fire, and the meal that comes with it, will be in two hours,” he told her.

“What should I do until then?”

He smiled that weird smile, looking past her, into her, and through her.  “Whatever suits a girl’s mood.”

“But I mean… shouldn’t I be meditating or something?”

“If a girl wants an ashram, there are many in this area.”

She shut her mouth.  He shut the flap.

She sat down on a thick blanket on the ground (the only thing in there).   The sunset cast its light through the cheap canvas of the tent.  She pulled off her boots, laid down on her back, her head resting on her black leather travel bag, and stared into the point where the panels of fabric came together.

She missed her mother’s chagrined looks.  She hated them, but they brought her home to a place of normalcy.  She wasn’t an outlaw, a violent thug, an avenging angel, a victorious prize fighter.  She was just a girl, an overgrown child whose mother was frustrated with her.  She’d always hated those looks, but now she craved them like air.  She needed them.

Without the roar of the bike’s engine to drown everything out, her mind moved from one sense memory to the next, at first slowly like a tumbleweed.  Dany’s arms around her, the bleached blond of her hair like cornsilk spread across Arya’s chest.  Dany would like it here, Arya thought wistfully.  Maybe when Arya got her shit together, they could come back out here as a couple.  They could lay together in a tent just like this one, and Arya could breathe her skin, scented like jasmine, and kiss her, and whisper those soft nothings that she liked to do before they tore each other to pieces.

She drifted to the bustling block in Brooklyn where they lived together, to the market that sold the black tea Dany liked, and the black olives that Arya liked, and the Palestinian pop music that thudded and wailed in the background.  The way her mouth watered when they shopped there, knowing that Dany was going to make something delicious for dinner as she dumped uncooked couscous by the scoop into a clear plastic bag, inspecting and caressing the produce and taking special care in picking a gleaming, deep purple eggplant with skin that would snap when she cut into it.

Arya’s thoughts drifted to the alleyway, some blocks from the market.  The pavement sprayed with blood and broken glass.  The broken glass was hers; it had been a beer bottle.  The blood was Dany’s brother’s, and she could still smell it, the metallic tang of it in her nostrils, a nauseating companion to the sound of his ribs breaking.  It was right.  For what he’d done to her beloved Dany, from the time she was only a child, he deserved what Arya and the girls had bestowed upon him that night in the alley.

Then why was her stomach tight when she thought of it?

Why had she and Dany never discussed it after that one night, when they watched the news on her Dany’s tiny television in her tiny studio apartment, where news of her brother’s brutal beating was a tiny footnote?

Arya fished into her bag and pulled out a bag of weed and some papers.  Carefully, precisely, she folded the paper and creased it, tore off the extra.  She broke the dense, stiff green bud into smaller and smaller crumbs, sifted them carefully into the folded paper.  Sometimes she needed to fill her senses with something intense, like the roar of the bike, to keep her grounded, but sometimes, she was hyperfocused, as she was now, sitting in a tent in the dimming light, rolling a thin, perfect joint.  Her fingers were nimble and knew the sequence of fold and twist and fold.  It was a masterpiece.  It was as flawless in its lines as the space shuttle.  

But the moment it was done, her mind drifted on, less gentle now as it rolled, less like a tumbleweed on the breezes and more like a pinball; from the kickboxing ring, to the streets, from the jail cell in Sunset Park where she’d been locked up, but never gotten booked, to the warehouse in Sheepshead Bay where her sister had showed up with an unconscious mobster in the back seat of her car.  From one bloody, broken face to the next.

It wasn't just the sense of justice she'd convinced herself she felt.  It had felt good.  The raw physical feeling of breaking a man, cracking his ribs, shattering his jaw, watching blood spray out of his mouth... it had felt good.  That troubled her more than the fact that she’d done it.  That was what tightened her stomach and tasted sour in her mouth, and what drove her across the country on her bike in search of what she told herself and Dany were answers but felt more like miles between her and her regrets, and nothing more.

She lit the joint, walked barefoot from the tent, and slowly wandered over to the reflecting pool.  It sat a healthy distance out from the furthest edges of the area where the tents stood sentry.  As she passed through them, she noticed a few people sitting out in front of some of them, reading, praying, meditating, and staring into space.  She didn’t notice the smell of any pot smoke and suddenly felt funny about lighting up, so she waited until she reached the edge of the pool.

After smoking more of it than she needed, maybe half, just to slow the careening of her unquiet mind, she looked at her own reflection, for the first time in a long while; her shaggy hair, face bronzed and cheeks windburned.  She’d ridden hard out of New York and taken very little rest.  She’d basically done exactly what it said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that you weren’t supposed to do, although she hadn’t done it for ego, because she was trying to prove anything.  She just needed the distance.

She stared into the pool.  A lone coyote somewhere not too far away howled once, sounding somewhat half-hearted about it.  She stubbed out her joint, and trudged in toward the main building, planning to attend the fire, and dinner, high as a kite.  

 

**

 

Arya was expecting more toasting of marshmallows over Jaqen’s modest firepit on the back deck.  What she got was more akin to a small bonfire.  Around it were a handful of faces, some serene, some looking as lost as she felt, their shadows shifting in the orange light.  The flames spat and sparked as Arya sat looking around the circle.  A young guy, maybe a little older than herself, sat a few feet to her left, shirtless and sporting what looked like several days of stubble.  

“Hey,” she addressed him quietly.  “This is my first night here.  What are we supposed to do at these things?”

His was one of the serene faces.  He gave her a gentle grin.  “You’ll see.  Jaqen puts some stuff in the fire, and says some words, and then mostly it’s a lot of quiet.”

Arya frowned.  “OK.  But like, what do we do?” she pressed, dissatisfied.  “What are we supposed to be getting out of it?”

He looked at her as if he was about to ruffle her hair.  “That’s up to you.  You just got here, so… you probably don’t even know why you’re here yet.  My best advice is just watch.”

“I know why I’m here,” Arya answered quickly.  “I’m looking for peace.”

“Yeah?  And what’s that mean?”  He seemed amused at her expression.  She didn’t know.  He leaned closer.  “It’s ok, you don’t have to know now.  You’ll figure it out.  You just have to be patient.  And still.”

He was handsome, she thought briefly, and had a warmth about him.  If the world had shaken out differently… She furrowed her brow.  “Patient and still aren’t my strong suits.”

He reached over and gently punched her shoulder.  “That’s ok, too.”   

She should have been annoyed by that action, but there were different rules here.  She felt that already.  She offered her hand.  “Arya.”

He shook it.  “Gendry.”

As promised, Jaqen H’qar came and threw some powders and herbs on the fire, muttering some things in another language (Serbian?  Hopi?  Arya had no idea).  The air became smoky, and thick with smells that she couldn’t place.  Lavender?  Sage?  Eucalyptus?  It was so heavy she almost felt dizzy.  She saw the others lay down on their blankets in the dirt and give themselves up to staring at the enormous sky studded with what seemed like a hundred million stars.  

A panic rose in her chest.  She got up suddenly, and walked away from the group, away from the circle of orange light, away from the thick, fragrant smoke.  It was darker where she stood; she could still see everything, but it was muted, and the smells from the fire were less overwhelming.

The brush behind her stirred, and she turned and found herself face to face with a coyote.  Its eyes were serious, golden even in the low light.  She was surprised to see that it was smaller than she expected a coyote to be.  “Are you lost too?” she asked it.

It edged nearer to her, sniffed her once, and then retreated slowly, backwards into the brush.

“A girl thinks she sees a mirror in the coyote,” came Jaqen H’qar’s voice quietly from behind her.  She hadn’t even heard him approach.

Arya jumped and turned to face him.  He was wearing a Sigur Ros tour shirt and his hair was stuffed up into one of those man-buns that Arya found a little weird.  “No,” she started to object, but he cut her off.

“The girl breaks away from the group, because she thinks she is a lone wolf.”

Arya sputtered for a minute, but said nothing.

“She is not,” he went on, “but she may not be able to learn that here.”

She looked at him, confused.

“Tomorrow, you leave,” he said.  “Tonight, you eat.”

“Leave?” she cried.  “I just got here.”

Jaqen handed her a stick with a hot dog on the end of it.

“I don’t understand, you can’t just kick me out!”

“It is the medicine that the girl requires,” he replied calmly.  He handed her a creased photograph, which she didn’t even look at.  She was too furious.

“I just got here!  I paid you money!  You can’t kick me out yet!  I haven’t even gotten to do anything yet!”

She stuffed the photo into her pocket.

“Go to the fire, cook your food,” he commanded.

She stood there holding the stick, then surrendered, because she hated to admit it, but she was hungry.  She trudged back, sat down next to Gendry, who looked amused, and began to cook her hot dog in the fire.

While she waited for it to be ready, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the photo he'd handed her.  It was of a sober woman with dark skin, serious sad eyes, wearing a dress that looked like it was from 1872.   She was elderly, her hair was white, and Arya could not begin to guess what she’d seen.  The photo itself was black and white, worn, creased, cloudy … it looked as though it was a relic literally yanked out of time and handed to her.

Slowly, she turned it over.  On the back, in spidery handwriting, it read:  “Mary Tully.”


	4. In the Small, Pale Hours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya remembered loving the idea that she was the spirit child of Mary Tully, the outsider, pulled into something that she didn’t understand. That she was the descendant of a Cheyenne woman warrior who had been broken and pulled into a white man’s world, a symbol of his conquering of the West, of industry, of his growing status. She liked to think that it was an explanation for her constant feeling of being forced through a life that she hadn’t been designed for. She was the soul descendant of Mary Tully, whose real name had been something like Runs With Coyotes or something that sounded like it belonged to an equally wild heart, who had once fired arrows on horseback and taken down desert birds from half a mile away.

_You’re done this time, Stark._

Arya remembered being marched in a walk of shame up the long hall to the headmistress’s office.  Her left cheek had been slightly swollen, one of the buttons popped on her plaid skirt, her button-down shirt untucked.  But Myrcella had gotten it worse.

Arya couldn’t remember now, all these years later, why.  She only remembered her mother going to the mat in the headmistress’s office, fighting her own fight to keep Arya in this, her fifth prep school in as many years.

She couldn’t remember why she’d tackled Myrcella Baratheon; even today, she still hated Myrcella’s brother, Joffrey, for hitting Nymeria with his car, but that wouldn’t happen until a few years later.  In the end, she was able to stay at Westover, but she never fit there.  She graduated by the skin of her teeth and never looked back.  She was a Stark, alright, but the weight of it never suited her, and she was full of doubt that she could ever measure up to the name.

 

_You’re done this time, Stark._

Syrio, her kickboxing trainer, had gotten fed up with her losing fights to sloppiness born of rage.  Or else winning them by tearing into the other fighter with more brutality than was needed or wanted. He’d seen the potential in her, agreed to take her on when nobody else believed in her, despite having a few boxers in his stable already.  “You just crave the impact,” he’d said with annoyance that night, “not the beauty of movement or strategy or the dance.”

“Come on, Syrio, you can teach me!”

“I can’t teach someone who doesn’t want to learn. You need to be in touch with your center in order to win, and I’m not sure you have one.”

She pleaded with him for one more fight until he relented.  She struggled to comprehend what he meant about finding her center, but she walked a tight line and took hits instead of raging.  She lost, but she kept herself in check and it was enough.  Syrio kept her.  Her eyes were blacked, her arms were bruised and her lip was bloody, but he kept her.  She fought on.  She still didn’t know why.

 

_You’re done this time, kid._

Her mother, frustrated, was on the verge of kicking her out of their Upper East Side brownstone.  Arya wished she could be like her sister, Sansa; the A student, the valedictorian, the journalist, the detective.  But she wasn’t.  Catelyn Stark didn’t know what to do with this daughter, this prickly, angry, lost, thrill-seeking daughter.  By the time the cops had picked Arya up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and her aunt Lysa had bailed her out and made the problem go away, Arya was ready.  She was ready to give in, to give herself up to something.  

 

_I’ll never be done with you, Arya._

Dany was the bright star of her life.  Dany, with her golden-brown skin and bleached-blonde hair,  with her punk rock and hijab, her pot smoking and Palestinian cooking and prayers and all of it.  They were each others’ beautiful reflections in a banged-up mirror.  Arya wore her scars outside, her knuckles nicked from fist fights and legs gashed from climbing around into places she ought not to have been; Dany wore hers inside, the parade of grief of her parents’ death to her brother’s abuse to the marriage to a thirty year old man that should never have happened when she was only fifteen, to two lost pregnancies, and homelessness.  Arya’s spikes stuck out; Dany’s turned in.  Arya was a raw wound; Dany was a slowly healing scar.  Arya was doubt; Dany was faith.

 

*****

 

She woke in the small, pale hours of dawn, longing for Dany.  Longing to hear the muffled sounds of riot grrl punk –Wild Flag? Sleater-Kinney?  Same difference, Arya thought– and smell the smell of Dany warming that flat bread in the skillet till the edges singed, so they could sit together and drink coffee and use the bread to scoop up mouthfuls of sour, buttery labneh with olive oil.  She missed their rough, sweet lovemaking, but she missed those other things more.  They meant home, and love, in ways that Arya hadn’t shared even with her own blood.

She rubbed her eyes.  She’d wanted to call Dany last night, but everything was so strange, she didn’t know how to explain what she had experienced.  Her Sunday mornings in the pews at St. Andrew’s had been perfunctory, and had stopped when she’d put her foot down at thirteen and told her mother she didn’t want to go anymore.  But this was miles from that.  Thousands of miles of dusty desert highway from it.  

She lit up a joint, took a few pulls, and looked at the picture again.  She’d always held a secret obsession with Mary Tully, the mystery, the unaccounted-for woman in the family tree who had passed something into the family stream, but nobody knew what.  As the weed crept in and blunted the impact of her sudden loneliness, she picked up her phone and, after walking out of her tent and waving it around in the air like a totem, trying to pick up enough bars, she called not Dany, but her sister, Sansa.  

“Hey,” she said brusquely.

“Hey,” Sansa responded, and she waited.  She didn’t want or need Sansa’s opinion about this trip, but she wanted something from her.

“Tell me again what we know about Mary Tully.”

An awkward pause.  “Um, Aunt Lysa’s trial is going fine, thanks for asking.”

Arya huffed.  “Look, I’m sorry, but you and I both know she’s going to be fine.  Mom hired Selyse Florent to defend her, and Aunt Lysa is so connected anyway.  I’m in the middle of the desert and I don’t have a lot of bars, and this is important.”

Sansa paused again.  “Mary Tully?  Why?”

Arya shook her head.  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  She stubbed out the joint on the sand.  “Look, you know I’ve always been obsessed with her, but what do we actually know?”

Sansa sighed, that sigh that Arya knew meant she was indulging something that she didn’t understand and was deeply troubled by, but also didn’t feel was worth picking a fight about.  “Not much.  She married Elston right before he really came into his fortunes.  We don’t have a maiden name or any other information on her in the genealogy.  We know she had five children with him, and that her list of “accomplishments” was a little thin for a lady of her social stature but that she was supposed to have written poetry and played the piano.”

“Well, I have a fucking picture,” Arya burst out, and waited for the reaction.

“What?” was all Sansa could manage.

“Well, you know I’m at this retreat with this weird shaman guy and he just busted out and handed me a photograph of Mary Tully last night, it’s dated 1872.”

Sansa paused.  “If it’s really from 1872 it’s not a photograph, it’s probably a daguerrotype.”

“A what?”  Arya stopped her.  “Whatever, nevermind.  What was our evidence that she was a Native woman?  Why did I become obsessed with that idea?”

Sansa hemmed and hawed for a moment.  “Well, it wasn’t unusual back then for white men to marry Native American women and give them Christian names, and I think we just went with that idea because we didn’t have anything else.”

Arya remembered loving the idea that she was the spirit child of Mary Tully, the outsider, pulled into something that she didn’t understand.  That she was the descendant of a Cheyenne woman warrior who had been broken and pulled into a white man’s world, a symbol of his conquering of the West, of industry, of his growing status.  She liked to think that it was an explanation for her constant feeling of being forced through a life that she hadn’t been designed for.  She was the soul descendant of Mary Tully, whose real name had been something like Runs With Coyotes or something that sounded like it belonged to an equally wild heart, who had once fired arrows on horseback and taken down desert birds from half a mile away.

But she was, after all that comforting fantasy, still a Stark.  A Stark who had washed out of several prep schools, was a bit of a name on the women’s kickboxing national circuit, and had been involved in a vigilante ring that she wasn’t going to jail for because her sister the detective had decided to simply not solve their case.  A Stark who, on the face of it, didn’t fit the name, but nevertheless, a Stark.  She had come to terms with that some time ago, or so she thought.  

“How do you even know it’s her?” Sansa asked.

“It’s got her name written on the back,” Arya replied, realizing how stupid that sounded.  As if Jaqen couldn’t have found any old picture of a woman and written Mary Tully’s name on the back.  But why?

“OK, but we don’t know what she looked like.”

“San, it’s gotta be her.  She looks like she could be Cheyenne or something.”

Sansa sounded incredulous.  “Is that why you went out there?  To try to find out about Mary Tully?  Arya, what the–”

“San, I’m losing you,” Arya lied.  “I’ll call you back later when I get someplace with better signal.”

She saw a tall shadow fling itself to the ground in front of her.   She turned and stared up through the blazing sunlight.  The morning was becoming less pale, the vast sky deepening into that vivid shade of  turquoise blue that seemed unique to this part of the country.  The sun now burned into her retinas, the size and shape of a golden dollar coin on fire.  It hung behind Jaqen’s head as he stood towering over her.  “A girl is taking her time getting ready,” he observed calmly.

Arya glared at him.  “Well, I’m not the one who wants to leave.”

“A girl should be thanking her shaman,” he scolded gently.

At this moment, she registered that he was dressed in riding gear and had a silver helmet tucked under one arm.  “Where are you going?” she asked.

“For a ride,” he said.  “As is the girl.  Hurry, the sun gets higher, and hotter.”  And he strode with slow purpose past her, toward the low-slung front house, in front of which she could just make out a black Honda Goldwing parked next to her Indian.

She didn’t entirely understand what was happening, but she was suddenly was overtaken with a sense of haste.  He was leading her somewhere, she realized, not kicking her out into the desert empty-handed.  

Her first lesson had been in trusting him, and she had failed it spectacularly.

She packed her things quickly, which didn’t take long, since she had barely unpacked them, and jogged out to where the bikes were parked in front of the building.

He stopped to give some instruction to the young woman who seemed to be an assistant, or disciple, or whatever one was supposed to call a person who helped a shaman.  And then he mounted his bike beside hers and beckoned her to follow.

 

****

 

They sped north up through the mountains.  When she was in the flatter part of the desert, it was hard to imagine the rugged beauty of Northern Arizona, the breathtaking sweep of the gigantic sky, the ragged lines of the bluffs in their rough-hewn majesty.  She was a city girl, and always would be, she expected, but she realized, riding through this landscape, that there was more to the world than her own little corner of it.  

They arrived after a few hours’ ride someplace unexpected.  She followed him into a state park with signs marking it as the entrance to the Grand Canyon.  It was midday in the blazing heat and she pulled off her helmet, her hair sticking to her face in dark strings.  Jaqen took off his helmet, seeming strangely cool.  

“The Grand Canyon?”  she asked him, incredulous.  “You’re taking me sightseeing?”

Jaqen smirked but said nothing.  He got off his bike and beckoned her.  She followed without any more questions, because trusting him was part of whatever she was supposed to be learning here.  They trudged up a path lined with scrubby desert brush that reminded her of nothing so much as large, windswept bonsai that had been treated a little badly.   They came up to the first viewing station, and she stopped.  Her mouth dropped open.

The canyons she came from were made of steel and concrete and glass.  New York felt immense to her, even though she knew many of its corners including some of the darker ones.  This was something else entirely.  

She remembered when 9-11 had happened; it had taken the city almost a decade to put that part of the city back together again.  She remembered going down there about a year afterwards, staring at the giant gaping wound in the concrete that went several stories down into the ground underneath.  It was a wound of staggering size.  But this was something else again.

The Grand Canyon was, for lack of a better word… grand.  It looked as though you could drop all of Manhattan into it and it would be an easy fit.  She could see the striations in the faces of the red-orange canyon walls of how many millennia of geological history, evolution, of man struggling with nature up and down its face.  It was ancient.  It was serene.  It was a product of the slow violence of cosmic time, which moved on its own scale separate and apart from what her brain could even begin to wrap itself around.  She saw, dotting the paths that descended into it, groups of people on foot, on donkeys, going down into it, as if seeing it from down there would make it somehow make its scale easier to comprehend.  Breezes blew softly across her sweaty face and cooled it as she sucked from her water bottle and stared into it in silence for several long minutes.  

There was more to the world than her own little corner of it, she realized as she processed this moment.  She’d thought that loving Dany had made her understand that.  She’d thought that becoming an avenging angel for abused women abandoned by the system had made her understand that.  She was starting to understand that all she had done, in both of those cases, and who knew how many others, was drag those things into her own context, bend them to her own understanding.  How many times had she done this?  She didn’t know.

She stood and wept silently.  The Canyon sat in silent repose.  She was not the first to weep into its depths, and would not be the last.  She was dimly aware of Jaqen pressing something into her hand, which she took without looking, assuming it was a tissue.  But when, a few moments later, she brought it up to her face, she realized it was a folded-up scrap of paper.  She frowned, unfolded it, and looked at it in confusion for a moment.  He’d written a single word on it:  “Yavapai.”

She looked beside her but he was no longer standing there.  She turned around, and saw him heading back up the path toward where they’d parked.  She jogged after him.  “Jaqen!  Jaqen, where are you going?  What the hell is this?  What’s this paper?”

By the time she reached him, he was already on his bike, starting it.  He looked at her with that infinite calm.  “Yavapai,” he told her, “is where a girl will go next.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?” she demanded.

He shook his head.  “That part of the journey, a girl must take alone.  She may return when she’s found what she’s looking for.”

Arya tried to keep calm, but she shook angrily.  “But I don’t know what I’m looking for!” she cried, trying to keep the tears and confusion out of her voice.

“But you do,” he assured her.  He rode away and left her standing, her face streaked with tears, in the burning sun beside the Grand Canyon with a scrap of paper in her hand.

_You do._


	5. Panning for Gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya discovers lost things in McCabe.

She couldn’t tell what was sweat and what was tears but she wiped both from her face and stared at the slip of paper in her hand.  She pulled out her phone and Googled “Yavapai”.  It was a county in Arizona, not too far from where she was now.   _ Thanks, Jaqen, that’s fucking helpful. _

She turned the slip over in her hand and noticed that on the back, it had another word written:  McCABE.

She googled McCabe.  It was a town in Yavapai County.  

A ghost town.

 

**********

 

Arya had been lost.  She’d bounced from one tony prep school to the next, graduated Westover by the skin of her teeth, and succeeded in the world of women’s kickboxing, to a point.  But she’d been unmoored, full of whirling anger and disaffection that couldn’t seem to spend itself in the ring, especially after her father’s death six years ago.  She’d found reasons to start smashing windows with her friends, trashing up places with bricks or baseball bats or pipes, or whatever she could find. They’d blazed a messy trail across Brooklyn until the night that she’d tumbled into the jail in Sunset Park and, instead of calling her mother to bail her out, she called her Aunt Lysa, the relative that her mother didn’t like discussing.

It only made sense.  She didn’t want those looks from her mother, those disappointed looks.  And Aunt Lysa was probably who her mother would end up calling anyway.  Being the widow of a prominent judge had its advantages.  Sometimes, Aunt Lysa could make things like that go away.

And she did.  But she also turned Arya and her group of rough and tumble friends into an organized, focused machine, meting out their own brutal justice on rapists and child abusers who had managed to dodge justice.  Lysa had started with the list of acquittals that had kept her Chief Justice husband up at night before he’d passed away.  They’d burned through that quickly, though, and moved on to cases that showed up in the back pages of the papers, or that cops grumbled about amongst themselves at precinct bars in the boroughs.

_ I’m not a Stark,  _ Arya thought to herself, speeding down the highway under the endless sky.  The Starks are upstanding, serious.  Her sister Sansa, she was a Stark.  The star student, the journalist, the cop; Sansa was a collection of unwrinkled outfits and unbent morals.  Starks were perfect like that.   _ I’m a Tully. _

Maybe Aunt Lysa was bipolar and full of wrath in need of a target.  Or maybe she was the spiritual child of Mary Tully, just like Arya suspected was true of herself.  

She wondered whether she’d find an answer to that question in McCabe.  

 

************

 

The hills of Yavapai county surrounding the area where she was supposed to find McCabe were low-slung and rolling, tawny-gold and brown, and dotted with scrubby brush and the occasional cascalote tree or desert willow.  And it was there, wedged into the hills, a cluster of long-abandoned buildings that nobody had ever bothered to tear down.  It was set back off of the highway where the breathing of the traffic was little more than a distant whisper.  She’d always thought that ghost towns would feel haunted, but the faceless windows didn’t stare back.  They just sat, gaping, lifeless.  It was unnerving, but not in the way she’d expected or romanticized as a child.  

No spooky cowboy spirits would be emerging from the run-down husk of a saloon.

McCabe had been a mining town, and when the mine stopped yielding the ores it had been intended for, the town shuttered.  At its height, in the late 1800s, it boasted a six bed hospital and one of the day’s few telephone lines running to Prescott.   She pulled her bike up to the bottom of a hill that had looked low from the distance but looked to be a much steeper incline now that she sat in front of it.  

Why had Jaqen sent her here?  To learn about emptiness and decay?

According to the little she’d briefly scanned through on the internet, the old California mine shaft was something of a tourist thing to do.  You could get killed if you fell in, but people liked to go up the hill and see it.  She stopped her bike, because the road wasn’t so much a road as a rocky footpath up the hill and she valued her father’s vintage Indian far too much to even try riding her up.  She dismounted, and walked up.

She stared for a few moments into the yawning blackness.   _ Is this supposed to be like staring into my soul or something?   _ She didn’t understand what she was doing here.

She called Dany.

“Hey,” Dany’s voice greeted her.  From across the miles, she sounded like home.  

“Hey,” Arya answered, her eyes scanning the baking landscape in the late afternoon heat.  

“Got any more sunrise pictures for me?”  She was playful, peaceful.  Arya felt strangely envious, but suddenly ached to lay next to her and feel that ease.

“No.”  An awkward pause followed.

“Are you learning anything at the retreat?”

Arya didn’t know how to answer.  “I am,” she decided after a moment, “but I don’t understand what it is yet.  And the guy is very weird.”

Dany’s voice took on a note of concern.  “What do you mean, weird?  Like, he’s a creeper or something?”

“No no, not that,” Arya assured her hastily.  “It’s … it’s hard to explain.”

“Well, what are you doing?  Meditating or… or what?”

“Actually,” Arya chuckled, “he rode up to the Grand Canyon with me and then ditched me there, and now I’m wandering around an old ghost town two hours south of it.”

Dany paused, digesting the information.  “Is that… part of the retreat?”

“I don’t know,” Arya answered, feeling suddenly light.  Maybe it was just Dany’s presence.  “But here I am.”

“I see.”

“Like I said.  Weird.”

“Okay.”  Dany thought for a moment more.  “Come home soon, will you?”

The sun burned low in the desert sky, gold fire pressing into the back of Arya’s skull.  “I will, baby.  I miss you.”

They hung up.  

A chubby kid came trudging uphill, carrying a backpack.  He was wearing a trucker hat and his round face was surnburnt.  He smiled at her.  She smiled back politely.

“You come to pan for gold?”

“Huh?”

He pointed off in the direction of the town.  “In the riverbed.  You buy the panning equipment and you pan for gold.  It’s a tourist thing.”  His drawl was thick and pleasant, and he held a beer in his left hand that was sweating even more than he was, if that was possible.  He tilted his head and peered at her a moment, taking in her riding gear.  “Ain’t you a tourist?”

She shrugged.  “Not as such,” she replied, offering nothing more.

He offered a meaty hand to shake.  “Name’s Carl.  Friends call me Hot Pie.”

She smirked.  “Why Hot Pie?”

“‘Cause I make pie.”

“Oh.”  She shook his hand and replied with a little smile,  “My name’s Arya.  My friends call me Arya.  And I don’t make anything.”

She glanced over at the dried-up riverbed.  She supposed that it would be full during monsoon season.  

“Anyway,” he persisted, “you ain’t gonna pan for gold?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t think I’m looking for that kind of gold.”

“You sure?  I got some extra picks and stuff in my backpack.  Can’t be too prepared, right?”

She smiled.  “Thanks.  I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

“Suit yourself.  I’m gonna head down before it gets dark.”  Hot Pie gave her a salute and strolled back down the hill.  She saw him pause by her bike and give it an admiring once-over, then look back up at her to give her the thumbs-up.  He was right; it was a nice bike.

She jammed her hands in her pockets and wandered toward the cemetery, which was fenced in.  She pushed past the fence and wandered through the rows.  The wind off the sands was still blistering, even with the sun this low, casting long shadows of the skeletal remains of the town.  The names on the stones became a blur:   _ Carter, Grant, Sullivan, Wallace.  Father of, wife of, mother of.  Beloved son.  Beloved husband.  May she rest in peace.   _

Who were these people when the town still heaved forth gold from its depths?  Who was she to mourn them now?  What business did she have with them?

She paused before a stone with a cross chiseled into the top of it.

_ Here lies Frank Carpenter. _ _   
_ _ Beloved husband to Margaret Wallis Carpenter. _ _   
_ _ Beloved father to Mary. _ _   
_ _ Beloved grandfather to Elston Jr. _ _   
_ _ Miner and a pillar of the McCabe community. _ _   
_ __ May he rest in peace.

Elston Jr.?  Mary?  What were the odds?

She pulled out her phone again and called her sister.

“Arya?”

“San.  San, do you know anything about the town of McCabe, Arizona?”

Sansa paused.  “Please tell me this isn’t more Mary Tully stuff.”

“Do you or don’t you?”

Sansa sighed.  “No, nothing.  Haven’t a clue.  Why?”

“What if I told you I found Mary’s father’s grave?”

“What?  How do you know?”

“I don’t.  But … Father to Mary.  Grandfather to Elston Jr.  What are the odds?  Don’t you think it could be?  I mean, Elston wasn’t a super common name back then, was it?”

Sansa’s annoyance ebbed back a bit.  “I don’t really know,” she admitted.

“This place,” Arya went on, excitedly.  “This place is a ghost town.  A literal, actual Old West ghost town.  The place died when the gold mine went belly up.  Isn’t it possible, San?  Isn’t it possible that Mary Tully’s records were lost because she was born here and the records just never got moved over??”

Sansa was clearly considering this possibility.  “Is that where you are now?”

“Yeah.  I’m standing in the cemetery.”

“Read me the stone.”

Arya read the stone to her.

“Frank and Mary Wallis Carpenter,” Sansa mused.  “Those don’t really sound like Cheyenne names, do they?”

Arya bit her lip.  Sansa was right.  She was so excited at the possible discovery that she hadn’t paused to consider the full implications of what it contained.  “I guess not,” she conceded.  

“Why is this so important to you?”

Arya didn’t know the answer, but she was suddenly overcome with a wave of despair.  “I gotta go,” she whispered, and hung up abruptly.

Mary was supposed to be the explanation.  Mary was supposed to be the reason why she was wild.  She was supposed to have gotten the Cheyenne warrior gene, that was supposed to be why she was the way she was.  Why she wasn’t like her other siblings, playing by the rules and fitting into the rarefied world she’d been born into.  She and her Aunt Lysa, they weren’t supposed to be mad, misfits.  They were just supposed to be the descendants of Mary, too noble and wild for the life they'd been dealt.

She sat down in the dirt next to Frank Carpenter’s grave, and wept until the sun went down and the desert cool rolled in, nipping at her fingers.  She was still just a thickheaded white girl, uncomfortable in her own skin and spoiling for a fight.  The stars sat silent above her head.  The moon’s silvery sliver hovered above the rim of the flat horizon.

She was going to have to find a place to spend the night.


End file.
